


we've got another thing coming undone

by loamvessel



Category: Dead To Me (TV)
Genre: F/F, Finger Sucking, First Time, Friends to Lovers, Lesbian awakening, i feel corny putting tags here lol, this is approximately half porn and half plot just read it it might be fun, top jen bottom judy
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-07-26
Updated: 2020-07-26
Packaged: 2021-03-06 02:40:49
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,099
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/25526077
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/loamvessel/pseuds/loamvessel
Summary: "She’d known Jen loved her, that was a given; the question had always been which form that love would take. And now she’s less and less sure she has an answer."Judy helps Jen discover something about herself.
Relationships: Judy Hale/Jen Harding
Comments: 13
Kudos: 92





	we've got another thing coming undone

**Author's Note:**

> I understand why they did it but I really didn’t love the way the show handled Judy’s sexuality. Everything with Michelle felt rushed and Jen’s complete lack of reaction felt more in line with a crust punk from Montreal than a “””heterosexual””” middle aged woman from the suburbs—since she and Judy basically dry hump each other in every scene, you’d think there would be a bit of awkwardness between them. Especially in a show that explores the nuances of trauma, it was really disappointing to see something that would constitute a pretty sizeable aspect of someone’s identity get brought up and left entirely unexplored. But I’m not writing the show, so you get this instead. 
> 
> dedz and credz to my better half christinaapplegay for checking my punctuation

“How did you know,” Jen asks her, “that you were… you know.”

“Into women?”

“Well, yeah.” 

She thinks about this for a moment. “I guess I always knew,” she says. “I used to make my barbies marry each other. And I would take off their clothes and touch their-”

“Their poontags?”

“Oh, don’t say that, Jen. They’re dolls. They don’t have a comparable anatomy to human beings. I mean look at their feet—that’s gotta be some kind of hoof, right?” 

“Okay, fine. Their nether regions.” 

“Yes, I touched their nether regions. Along with their tits and their little plastic butts.” Judy can feel herself blushing. She feels like she’s a little girl again, fascinated by the porn magazine one of her teenage neighbours brings home. She had giggled at the pictures of beautiful women with the giant breasts, and then she’d felt strange. She loves it when women talk to her. She loves the attention she gets from teachers and other mothers, the few in the neighbourhood more attentive than her own, the way they always smell like flowers, the sugary sweet scent of drugstore perfume that rolls off them as they bend over to correct her work. Especially the seventh grade art teacher, a young woman just out of college who always wants to show her pictures to the class. 

Judy has a way of making people like her, want to lean in to her and put their faces up close. Most of the time she’s grateful for this—it means people tend to go easy on her when she’s in trouble, or give her extra when she’s doing something well—but now, gangly and ill at ease in her twelve year old body, it makes her blush. It’s later, when she’s thirteen, when she learns what a lesbian is for the first time and she feels the dread rising in her stomach. She tells herself to wait, that she’s still young, that she’s attracted to men (which is true), and that maybe the way she feels about women isn't actually what lesbians feel. But she knows there’s something wrong with the way a grin from the dark haired girl in her building makes her heart beat strange. Or the time she sneaks into a life drawing class at fifteen and sees a naked woman, a real naked woman, for the first time in her life, and it feels a bit like she really has to pee. 

She’s never really discussed her sexuality with Jen, because she didn’t think it was any of Jen’s business. It wasn’t anyone’s business but Judy’s, except maybe the women she decided to have intercourse with, which would make it their business, like, by proxy. They both knew about Michelle, a knowledge that peppered the air between them, but they’d never talked about it at length. She’d never looked Jen in the eye and said “I’m gay” or “I am bisexual.” They’d never had to have had the awkward conversation where Jen reassured her that she loved gay people, that there was nothing wrong with her at all, that this didn’t change anything about them, even though it did, and they both knew it. 

She’d come out, at least to herself, years before. She jacked off to ethical pornography of all genders. She had never told Steve because she knew what he’d say—either accuse her of making it up or suggest a threesome. And Jen...well, sometimes running over someone’s dead husband takes greater precedence in your guilt filled subconscious than the fact you maybe, possibly, want to eat them out. 

Jen had taken the whole Michelle thing well, which reassured her; at least her friend didn’t suspect her of wanting to molest her as well as infiltrate her family. No matter how nice a girl was to your face, you always had to be careful around them if you wanted to keep going to sleepovers. Judy had learned that the hard way in tenth grade. 

If anything, though, she’d thought Jen had seemed more drawn to her after Michelle. She’d always wanted to talk about it, would always bring up things that she knew they were both interested in, like astrology or milk alternatives, in a way that made her wonder if Jen was trying to steer the conversation. Jen was possibly the most average suburban white woman ever, except for the fact she was extraordinary, and Judy had never really given much thought to her sexuality. But Jen had noticed what existed between her and Michelle even before she had articulated it to herself. 

Most straight women could spot a theatre twink just fine, but were blind to the subtle, quiet nuance in the interactions between women. But Jen had turned to her at the arcade and said “you like her,” and she realized she did like Michelle, just as she realized she’d felt Jen’s eyes on her that night, the careful tilt of her head. Jen had touched her face that time she thought she might have been pregnant. She had brushed the lock of hair from her forehead. She had said, I love you more than wine. 

So it’s not really a surprise to her when Jen, face pensive, says, “I used to do that too.”

“The Barbie poontags?”

Jen nods, suddenly embarrassed. “I mean, I thought everyone did that.”

She shrugs. “Maybe,” she says. “You’re probably right.” She realizes Jen’s probably close to a realization she’s not ready to have yet, and opts for damage control instead. “I mean, if you didn’t like, have sex dreams about your friends, or”—she breaks off, not knowing if she’s willing to bare her previous exploits in the name of friendship. Judy’s honest, but she’s not that honest. Or, well, you know, stuff like that. 

Jen just shrugs and looks away. “I was just curious,” she says, finally. “It was one of those things like, you know, I’d never really seen anyone else’s body so I wanted to know if mine was right. So, took off their clothes and… looked. You know.”

Judy does know, and says as much, and the conversation meanders on. Apparently Charlie vapes—or are least used to vape, it’s a lot less trendy now—and Jen only found out about it about a year after the fact. They must think I’m the most incompetent mother on the face of the earth...They talk into the night, and the wine bottle empties. Then, suddenly, Jen asks her: “was Michelle your first time? Like, with a woman?”

The question startles them both. She wonders if Jen’s drunk (she is, a little) but her friend looks back at her with a level gaze, like whatever Judy tells her, Jen’s going to hang onto every word. 

“If I answer you, I get to ask you something back.” 

“Fine. Deal,” says Jen, although at her level of intoxication, she could probably sign over her house and be none the wiser.

“Yes, she was my first.”

“How did it feel?” 

“See, that’s two questions.”

“Okay, well, then, you can ask me two after. How did it feel?”

She looks at Jen and Jen peers back at her, holding her gaze with a dubious fixity, her blue eyes glassed out, eyelids low. She’s obviously drunk—Judy doubts she would be asking these questions otherwise—which only confirms her suspicion that this is something Jen really, really wants to know. So she relents, again, even if she’d technically promised Jen to start saying no, because she knows that if someone, anyone at all, had sat down and answered these questions for her when she was a girl, her mental landscape would be very different. 

“It felt like I could breathe for the first time,” she admits. “Not that I don’t like men but there was no...forbidden aspect. Having sex with a man is exactly what you’re told you’re supposed to do. But with women, it’s like, don’t think about the elephant, right? And suddenly it’s all you can think about, all the time, and you go crazy, you know. Like making yourself stare at women until you’re convinced you don’t feel anything at all for them, even if it’s not true. Which really freaks them out, by the way, so don’t do it.”

The conversation had moved on after that, but Jen had seemed distant, staring out into the dark with a strange expression on her face. The next day she’d been sober and matter of fact, obviously unwilling to talk about what had passed between them, but she caught Jen’s gaze on her more than once, the flurry of movement as she turned away. She loves Jen, deeply, had felt herself becoming attached to her, imprinting like a baby duckling, and she’d been content to love her as a sister, as “aunt Judy,” to dream of Jen and fuck other people, and maybe get over her one day. 

She’d never understood the idea of the straight girl crush—what was the point of loving someone who would never want you back—but she’d never known Jen before this. They were pair bonded, obviously akin to each other. She knew without question that this was the most significant relationship in her life. She’d been content to become the third wheel, the stereotype—Shirley MacLaine in that movie with Audrey Hepburn—if it meant they could be around each other. But lately she feels Jen noticing her, the little glances toward her chest or ass, furtive and discreet, the way she looks a little too hard at her face when she wears a low cut dress in a way that makes a spark of hope start up in her. She flushes, turns away, and sees that Jen is flushing too. 

Somehow she’d never considered the idea that Jen might be into her. She’d assumed Jen would want someone older, more stable and less like a Free People ad (although Judy would never—if she wanted to amputate an arm in exchange for a dress, she’d go to Ace and Jig, thank you very much). She’d been convinced that Jen would want her mirror image, that she’d dive into the lady pond and emerge with someone quaint and relatively normal for her children, a woman with a ponytail and some job like “barrister” or “head of marketing.” She would be the fun one, the one who kept them young and weirded them out with her hippie schtick, and she’d drink with them and watch Jen and this mystery lady make out on the couch. In the end that’s what everyone wants from Judy—always a hookup, never a partner, Steve trading up for a fertile woman in a pencil skirt, a reassuring, unremarkable blonde. 

Yet somehow Jen has deigned to keep her around, stuttering and blushing around her like a teenager and glancing at her from the corner of the kitchen. She’d known Jen loved her, that was a given; the question had always been which form that love would take. And now she’s less and less sure she has an answer. 

***

She says, “you still owe me two questions, you know.” 

Jen’s eyes turn to meet hers, and Judy notices the slight hitch of breath, the muscles moving in the woman’s face. Drinking again in the outdoor living room, the night alive with insects, a crosshatch bulk of trees looming in the dark. Jen waffles a little, then finally agrees, but the careful stillness in her face says: be careful. Please. She is a woman with a secret and they both know it, ringed wanly in the fallout of the deck lights, on that balmy night without stars. 

The first time Judy kissed a woman she had felt her entire body shift, something in her chemistry or anatomy adapting to the weight that had suddenly been lifted away. She’d felt it the first time she’d heard Michelle say “girlfriend” and she’d realized this was a possibility, not just for other people, but for her. That she could want and be wanted back, not just by the people she was supposed to be wanting but the ones she wasn’t, too. She wants Jen to feel that free. 

“Can I kiss you?” she asks. 

Jen pauses just the briefest instant of a second, then nods. Judy takes her face in her hands and their lips make contact, softly, just the faintest brush of plush skin against her own mouth, the suggestion of wet. Touchdown. She has thought about this moment for a long time—she’s dreamed it, but could never quite imagine it like this, the precise taste of Jen’s mouth, the smell of the powder on her face, the small gasp at first contact that disappeared into her body when their lips met. This is real life, and Judy has the ache in her torso and the overeager dampness starting up between her legs to prove it. She kisses slowly, giving Jen the freedom to deepen the kiss or break away and Jen presses her mouth against hers insistently, pulling Judy towards her so their bodies are flush, a path of gilt heat drawn by a painter’s brush, this closeness an answer. 

Some part of Judy, the part that watches and listens and waits, knew this would happen. But the majority of her, the part that thinks with her body first and makes sense of things after, feels dizzy with disbelief. She feels, more than sees, Jen taking her in, fascinated, curious, Jen’s hands ranging over her body, her back, her breasts, with a barely contained urgency, and Judy shivers under the touch, already pounding with wanting. She rolls her hips in an involuntary arc and feels Jen’s hips thrust to meet hers, the small gasp. They break away and look at each other. The first heartbeat of desire. Jen has a look on her face like a woman who has just been shown a secret room that has been hidden, undiscovered, in the walls of her house. Like she never knew this was a possibility. 

She’d had a sense she might have to lead Jen, to initiate her into the rites of sapphic intercourse, but in the time it takes the two of them to ascend the staircase to the bedroom, some switch has flipped on in Jen and she’s back to her cool, confident self, striding across the polished hardwood with a gait as lithe and powerful as a tiger, pulling Judy into her lap. Judy straddles her, the modal skirt petaling over them both as Jen scrapes kisses across her collarbone and throat, and then, tentatively, her breasts. Judy had felt particularly pervy the first time she’d been up close and personal with another woman’s breasts, so she presses her body against Jen’s mouth to let her know her touch is welcome. More than welcome. Jen’s mouth finds the small hard bud of her nipple under the thin fabric of her dress and bites, and Judy can’t restrain the liquid moan that escapes her. 

Jen puts a finger to her mouth. “Shhh, Judy. Be a good girl.” She shivers, arousal like mercury in her, and the finger pushes past the barrier of her lips and enters her, thick soft flesh in the hot red world of her mouth. She sucks, the finger gliding in and out of her, a motion earnest and intimate as penetration. “Good girl,” Jen coos again, and Judy lets out another half-drowned moan, rocking back and forth as the arousal spools out of her. She wants to touch Jen, to tear off her clothes and take her in her mouth, but she also wants Jen to take her, to ravish her, to know her, in the biblical sense of the term. However you’d describe a hard, fast fuck. She wants Jen to push her back against the bed, spread her legs, and enter her, fully clothed, dress pushed up against her hips, with two rough fingers. She wants all these things, but she’s having a hard time articulating any of them. She’s having a hard time forming any words at all. 

But Jen has different ideas. She reaches forwards and unhooks the small fastener on the inside of Judy’s dress. “Take this off,” she says, tugging at the material. “I mean, if you want to. You’ll tell me if you don’t want to do something, right?” In answer, Judy kisses her, stands up, and unties the bow that holds her wrap dress in place. 

“Slowly,” Jen says. “I want to look at you.” So Judy goes slow. She lets the dress slide down her body at an agonizing pace, like a bead of water sliding down her back. Jen is watching her, the expression on her face close to rapture. Judy slips a strap of her bralette off her shoulder and looks at Jen for confirmation. Jen nods, and Judy slides another strap off, just as slowly as before, then reaches up to unfasten the clasp. 

She’s impossibly turned on, Jen’s gaze on her making her body stiffen and burn. She’d never realized how pleasurable it was just to look and be looked at, to see the expression on Jen’s face mirrors the one that is very likely on her own, especially as Jen slips a hand under the waistband of her pants and begins to touch herself, her eyes on Judy all the while. Somehow, being desired feels so much more heightened when she has been the desirer, feels, in sympathy, the pleasure of looking alongside the pride of being seen. When all of her clothes are at her feet, she steps out of the puddle of fabric like it’s a pool of old skin. 

They kiss on the bed, Jen’s body pressing into hers, feeling pleasantly debauched in her nakedness, grinding against Jen’s conveniently placed, still trousered leg. She rolls her hips insistently, trying to drive the message home. She’s more than half gone already, and she’s barely even got her clothes off. She has no idea how Jen is coming up with this stuff—if she’s imitating some movie, or if it emerges from some natural wellspring in her—but either way, what she’s doing is solid gold. Even Jen’s hesitant finger inside her, just the faintest touch against her center, might have been enough to push her over the edge, had she been a weaker woman. 

Which is maybe why it surprises her so much when Jen suddenly freezes and looks at her. “I don’t,” and she shakes her head, “I don’t know what to do from here,” she says, and now she’s small and nervous, like a kid in class who doesn’t know the right answer, all her supernatural bravado evaporated in that moment of confession. 

“Hey, it’s okay,” she says. “I mean, just imagine touching yourself.”

“But ours are different. Yours has a different, I don’t even know. A different shape. Fuck. Porn did not prepare me at all for this. Theirs all look the same—which is fucking ridiculous, actually—”

She knows Jen well enough to know that she’s this close to freaking out, just inches from imploding into herself. 

“Okay, hey, it’s okay,” she says. “You’re really good at this. Like, a natural. Like, I think you were put in this earth to fuck women.”

Jen’s face lights up. “Shut up. You’re kidding.” 

“I’m dead serious. Scout’s honor, Harding.” She holds up her pinky because she has some vague notion that’s supposed to mean something to the good institution that is the Boys and Girl Scouts of America. 

“Oh, please. Like you were ever in Girl Scouts.” Jen takes her hand, pushes the pinky down and unfurls the middle three fingers from the fist. “This is Scout’s Honor,” she says. 

“You were a Girl Scout?” Of course, she thinks. Girl Scouts was probably invented with the express purpose of attracting blonde, blue eyed girls with names like Jennifer Harding. 

Jen smirks. “K-6, baby.” She’s still grinning as she takes Judy’s hand and slides all three fingers into her mouth. 

Judy had been turned on on the other side of this, the girth of Jen’s fingers filling her mouth, but this is a new pleasure, the tantalizing suction of Jen’s mouth moving up and down her hand, as though it’s a preview of what’s to come. If Jen uses her mouth like that—god, she can’t think about that. She’s about to come already just from this. 

She curls her hand into a fist, and then all of her hand, one half at a time, disappears into Jen’s mouth, a small tongue, delicate as a kitten’s, worrying the groove of her knuckle. 

“See?” she pants. “You’re a natural at this. How the fuck do you think up this stuff?”

“I was just gonna keep going until you stopped me. I figured you would know like, all the right stuff to do.”

“Believe me. What you’re doing is amazing.”

Jen reaches down and touches her pussy again, almost experimentally. “Oh, you’re really wet,” she says. 

“Uh, yes. Because you’re really-”

She gasps as Jen’s deliberately curling finger glides over that sensitive spot.   
“-good at that.”

“Right there?”

“Uh huh. Please. And then just, back and forth.”

“Hm. I like up and down.”

“That’s because you’re special,” she tosses back, lighthearted, but she really means it, and knows Jen knows she means it too. 

Jen fucks her like that, one hand between her legs, her mouth worrying Judy’s breasts, her face still, concentrated, collapsed into the world of herself, every fibre of her being aimed towards a singular goal. Judy comes hard and fast, burying her face in the feather soft skin of Jen’s neck, wanting to scream, to cry out, to call Jen’s name and be claimed by her, to let everyone know that she’s hers. 

It’s not the smoothest sex she’s ever had, but she’s so turned on it barely matters, and seeing Jen’s face hovering inches from hers when she comes, the quiet, rapturous expression of pride on her face when she realizes that she, Jennifer Harding, has brought Judy to orgasm, is worth far more to her than the most skillful of cunnilingus. And besides, the thought of Jen’s presence alone, of Jen’s mouth on her breasts, Jen’s hand between her legs had still managed to produce one of the strongest orgasms she’s ever experienced. 

“How was that?” Is she rolling, or does Jen actually look anxious right now. 

“That was...fucking amazing.”

“Really? Like, you’re not just saying that because if it was bad and I know it was bad I’ll feel like shit?”

“Yes, really. I don’t know how you do all that, that fucking dominatrix shit.” She shuts her eyes and breathes in deep, trying to get her breath back. Her body is still pulsing with the aftershocks of orgasm, and she feels light filled, paper thin, a pleasant throbbing between her legs. She thinks, with relative certainty, that she’s trembling a little; she’s never been so conscious of her own heart. 

She opens her eyes and Jen’s face materializes, that dear face so familiar to her, the contours she knows almost as well as her own. She feels filled by a strange, double pronged emotion, an intense love that’s also an ache, a tenderness so extreme it stretches to the other side of its meaning and becomes a wound. She almost blurts out “I love you,” because she’s known that so long the knowledge of it has become an objective part of her, something she might reveal as casually as she would her coffee order, or the fact she has brown eyes. But she doesn’t because she knows Jen isn’t someone who says these things right away, just like she knows it doesn’t mean Jen loves her any less. Jen kisses her forehead, and then her mouth, and they look at each other in a little bubble of disbelief, shocked that this thing that has taken two years to grow between them has solidified with a few touches in the space of barely an hour, and now they’re on the other side. 

Jen is still mostly clothed, only her shirt discarded in their frenzy to give her a better range of motion. She’s lying there, filmed in sweat, chest heaving in the dark smooth stuff of her bra, cloudy white stain on her very professional twill work trousers where Judy had pushed against her leg just fifteen minutes earlier. She’s never wanted someone more. 

She looks deep into Jen’s eyes. “Jennifer Harding, can I fuck you?”

Jen smirks. “Is that your second question?”

**Author's Note:**

> i have a twitter now! come bully linda's daughter's father with me at @judyhalesimp (handle is work in progress)


End file.
